The field of the invention relates generally to antimicrobial sanitizers.
Alcohol-based sanitizers have found increasing use by consumers and institutional facilities due to the capability to quickly kill microbes without the use of soap and water. Pathogenic microbes are typically transmitted by person-to-person or object-to-person contact. The probability of transmission increases when personal hygiene, such as hand washing, is inadequate. Hand washing with soap and water provides an effective method for reducing the potential for microbe transmission and contamination, but it is not always practical or feasible to sanitize the skin in this manner. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers can be used to sanitize the hands in such cases, or can be used as a supplement to soap and water.
Alcohol-based sanitizers are effective against many types of pathogenic microbes including antibiotic resistant bacteria, tuberculosis, flu viruses, cold viruses, human immunodeficiency virus, and fungi. Alcohol is typically efficacious at skin contact times of less than a minute. For this reason, alcohol-based hand sanitizers are extensively used in hospitals as an alternative to antiseptic soaps, and have two general applications: hygienic hand cleaning and surgical hand disinfection. Alcohol based hand cleaning compositions provide a better skin tolerance as compared to antiseptic soap and have been shown to have more effective anti-pathogen properties as compared to antiseptic soaps.
Problematically, alcohol-based sanitizers are generally effective only during contact time and have little or no residual effect. Because the sanitizers do not achieve complete germ kill, recolonization of pathogenic microbes after sanitizer application can occur. Further, recurrent use of alcoholic sanitizers may leave a biofilm on the skin surface that may entrap pathogenic microbes resulting in decreased effectiveness with added use in the absence of hand washing with soap.
Therefore, there is a need for improved alcohol-based hand sanitizers that provide for increased antimicrobial effectiveness after multiple applications.